Forum: Author Hangout

Book Sharing Sites Flikart and Oyster Give Up the Ghost

Just received a notice, from smashwords, that the early book sharing sites, Flikart and Oyster are now belly up. (Oyster was purchased by Google, which is shuttering it, which means they're likely to launch their own service soon to compete directly with Amazon since Google Books (the sales site) is performing so badly).

This shows that Amazon has essentially captured the entire book share enterprise, and smaller entities can no longer cope on an independent basis. Although I've never sold much on any of these platforms, and refuse to participate with Amazon's platform which discriminate against larger books (i.e. those over 10,000 words), it's sad seeing book selling options shrinking.

We've discussed it before. I was referring to Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program, where authors with longer books refused to participate because they earned virtually nothing, but authors of short stories were making a fortune.

Amazon created an unworkable platform for authors, but left a huge hole in it for certain authors to take advantage of. The smaller sites never had this particular problem, but Amazon has. They've since flipped their approach, but so far, I haven't seen much change in usage by authors. (Though, to be honest, I've never subscribed to the service myself.)

I was referring to Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program, where authors with longer books refused to participate because they earned virtually nothing, but authors of short stories were making a fortune

Authors of longer novels still participated, but the old model encouraged novellas, so more and more shorter works showed up (to the point where an author would break up a novel into 3). It didn't discriminate against longer novels; it encouraged shorter ones.

Amazon fixed the problem when they went to pages read. It was a good change. It was Amazon being fair.